come_to_think

Happy Birthday!  %^)

Reading:  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)

It is comforting to read a book that proclaims good news in complete accord with my prejudices.  Professor Pinker has written a massive treatise arguing that there is such a thing as moral progress and that we have seen a great deal of it over the last few centuries and most particularly in my lifetime (I am just old enough to remember W.W. II).  There are a great many statistical graphs, mostly having to do with killing (that being the easiest kind of wickedness to quantify), but the book also chronicles the decline of other forms of cruelty.  It then considers, with due caution, various possible causes of the change.

I have not yet read any reviews of this book, but I dare say they will mostly be hostile.  People who have put a lot of effort into combatting this or that evil have a vested interest in the continuation of the combat and a reasonable suspicion of any news that might tempt them to let down their guard.  Professor Pinker is at pains to demonstrate that his arguments have no such intent and need have no such effect, but is unlikely to satisfy such people.  Also, this is a matter in which all questions are party questions, and those who read this book with the idea of pressing it into a leftist or a rightist mold will find it to be exasperatingly off message.  Finally, those who extrapolate from headlines will find the thesis simply incredible, for wickedness is a large part of what the news media have for sale ("If it bleeds, it leads").

On 9 December 1972, after hearing a few libertarian Republicans tell each other horror stories about poor blacks, I wrote in my journal:

...The plain & dangerous fact is that American society has no use for these people; it is not exploiting them....  The danger that they pose to the ruling class (us) is not that they will deprive us of their negligible productive capacity, nor that they will participate in a successful rebellion, but that they will tempt us to kill them.  We are technically & morally capable of such a thing....

Such a operation would pay for itself in a couple of years in reduced welfare costs.  What will prevent us from carrying it out is not prudence, but our bourgeois inhibitions against killing.  Fortunately, these seem to be getting stronger rather than weaker, at least in the upper middle class.  The Vietnam war has been prosecuted with less than Christian regret, but at least the level of hypocrisy is far higher than in W.W. II, and that is important.  Hypocrisy delineates the shifting shoreline of decency: where its range is large, the beach has a shallow slope, & the prospects for rapid change are great; when the typical position shifts outward, we have more ground to stand on.  Now [N.B. 9 December], we do not bomb Hanoi; then, we bombed Hiroshima.  Now, we say we are trying not to kill civilians; then, we were proud of how many we killed.  That's where the boundary is now.

But in the lower middle class it is probably moving the other way....  [I]t is easy to imagine a barber or a druggist hearing a black intellectual prate about "genocide" & murmur "Good idea." as he switches channels.  People will do what is expected of them if they get the chance.  Will they get the chance?  It would take something like a fascist revolution; for the present upper middle class occupies the governmental bureaucracy & the communications industry pretty securely, and the lower middle class is demoralized & disorganized.  The Wallace vote is an index of their hopes, and it will bear watching.  They, not the black lumpenproletariat, are the most dangerous class over the next decade.  After that, they will be as obsolete as cottonpicking slaves, & as grateful for welfare.  (Exactly as grateful.)

Governor Wallace, IIRC, said "The American people want a government that's mean".  It turned out he was overgeneralizing from his friends in Alabama.  More recently, our previous vice president, attacking the present administration, called the antiterrorist effort "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business".  It is conceivable that he is right: that we really do have to give meanness a new lease on life in order to protect ourselves against suicide bombers.  But I think it far more likely that he was merely appealing (a little desperately) to his tough, mean, nasty, dirty constituency, and will be disappointed at the measure of it.

Reading: Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells

Read because Wells was a presence in my family (I read some of his sf while a child, and I recall a book of his stories bearing a picture of him with a twinkle in his eye), because the book was widely praised (by Orwell & others), and because of a striking quotation in Russell & Russell's charming picture book On the Loose, which I have liked for forty years.

The narrator, brought up as a servants' child in a stately home of England, is taken in by an uncle who makes a fortune in patent medicines and parlays it into an immense speculative empire that eventually crashes.  He is criminally liable & dies in exile.  The nephew helps him now & then, and uses some of his money for experiments in the new science of aeronautics.  The action takes place around 1910, but is topical insomuch as we have recently been reminded that the busy rich can be a greater economic & moral burden on society than the idle poor.  Thus, it is helpful in describing how human beings, not initially or ever entirely depraved, can get trapped in that kind of behavior.  The moral is not their wickedness, but the decadence of Western civilization (in 1910!), which encourages wastefulness in general.

Most of the book, however, is not concerned with the uncle's machinations, which are described rather sketchily, but with the nephew's & some others' love affairs, a subject on which I am ignorant & anesthetic.  There are also a couple of adventures:  The nephew attempts to rescue his uncle from bankruptcy by stealing some valuable ore from Africa, which, being radioactive, rots the boat & sinks it.  He also flies his uncle to France in an amusing hybrid of dirigible & airplane.

The book did not hang together well for me, tho it must have for people more familiar with the milieu & with neurotypicals.  The best part, for me, remains the passage I read in 1970:

But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour's eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn't, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept "fit" by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

As is well known, if you put three mirrors at right angles to each other, a ray of light entering the corner will be reflected back in the direction it came from.  The people we sent to the moon left some devices of that kind there, with the result that we can do lidar on the moon and measure its motions exquisitely.

I have wanted for a long time to put such a thing in an upper corner of my room, so that if you look at it from anywhere, you'll see your face upside down.  1-ft mirror tiles, available on the Web from various suppliers, are just the thing, but I worried about how to mount them.  Then it occurred to me that they wouldn't have to be mounted on the ceiling; they could rest on one of my tall bookcases.  So I ordered some, and put them together with duct tape, in such a way that the bottoms & tops of the vertical mirrors are flush.  The top mirror, being unsupported at the outer corner, sags a little, so that it looks as if you had four eyes; but an inconspicuous strut, consisting of a 12-in. stretch cut from a coathanger, takes care of that.

The tiles come in boxes of six, so I have three left over.  Anyone in the vicinity who wants to make a retroreflector is welcome to them.

I just finished rereading Kipling's Captains Courageous, one of the great books of my life.  Here is part of a letter I wrote to a friend after I first read it, >30 years ago.  I was in a commune in Virginia at the time, and she had left it.

I see I was somewhat unfair to Kipling; I know a little more now about his experience with America & his attitude toward women.

*

10 December 1979

...

The week before my last letter...I read for the first time Kipling's Captains Courageous, which was on a chair in the Octagon Room.  It had a powerful effect on me: I cried several times while reading & rereading certain passages, and the experience colored my atmosphere for most of a week; I kept singing sea songs & mooning over it.

The book itself (in case you haven't read it) is a vivid & interesting period piece, impressively American when one considers the paucity of Kipling's experience with its subject.  It also provides further data on his ferocious misogyny (the villain is the hero's doting mother) & infatuation with unsavory adventurers (there is no doubt in my mind that the plural in the title is meant to put the hero's father --- a "captain of industry" --- in the same class as the sea captains who get their chance to make the boy grow up because the father has been too busy).  But my main response was to be reminded of how terribly anxious I am about not being grown up: being spoiled, having missed adversity.  The book aroused this anxiety (of course) directly thru its plot, but also indirectly and perhaps more powerfully & instructively thru its subject matter, in that it always gives me pause to be reminded of how terribly dependent I am on People Who Do What I Can't Do.  (Cf. Orwell, "Down the Mine"; Stewart, Storm; etc.)  And not just for necessities --- however defined --- but for codfish balls, at a time when Chesapeake Bay crabs were 25¢ a dozen.  Of course, fishing is not so dangerous these days, but I suppose I could calculate how many people like me it takes to kill another miner by keeping their rooms another degree warmer.  It makes me sick to hear people snigger at the power company, i.e. at people who go out in thunderstorms & rig cables so that we can have music to milk cows by.  Kipling knew the type: "Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep."  But he didn't just shame people; he offered them a socially useful escape from the shame:  Just pass the "If" test with a score of 85% or higher, and you can say "I'm pulling my weight, and I could pull yours if I had to."  Even if you do it under duress, you still get full credit.

Socially useful, but so was Santa Claus.  The real question is whether either the shame or the relief ought to be afforded any intellectual respectability.  Let us see.

I'll consider the "powerful & educational" point first, tho in the meantime (it is now 14 December...) it has occurred to me that its interest is magnified for me by its being a distraction from Kipling's direct attack on my kind.  A spectacular power the market system has is to collect the tiniest wants of a multitude & concentrate them on a few, exacting the devotion or sacrifice of their lives.  This power is of great social value.  A thing like the New York subway system, for example, could actually be built on the mere plausible expectation of a billion nickels one at a time.  But the power to concentrate is also the power to crush; the market makes a crowd of all of us, like those crowds that, every year or two, kill some of their number by trying to get thru a doorway.  (It happened a lot at bomb shelters during the war.  When I read about that rock concert in Cincinnati, I reflected that I had thought of this metaphor several times during the previous week.)  In the book, the captain's wife "hated the sea s if it were alive & looking", but of course it was the market that was alive & looking, looking thru her eyes & finding its creations good.  Kipling mentions how much her house cost --- well up in the middle class, I supposed.  Gloucester lost 100 men a year, more or less, and the price of fish adjusted itself to bring another 100 in & support the charities that squabbled over their broods of widows & orphans.

Who were the people thus drawn over the margin?  They had to have guts, and from that a good 2/3 of virtue follows.  But they must have been a little crazy to strike such a bargain (the craziness --- money-worship --- being a kind that was held in even higher & more general esteem then than now), and they must have been made more than a little crazy by the consequences of having struck it.  It is remarkable that the normal response to "cognitive dissonance" --- to exaggerate benefits & scorn costs when both are large --- was altogether quenched in those people.  On the contrary, in their songs, ceremonies, & conversations they dwelt endlessly on the terrible price they were paying, & not at all on what it bought them.  And indeed, it is easy to imagine that after a few seasons' collective victory over danger & deprivation, the resulting high morale (at least for the men) became the main reinforcer, and the money almost an embarrassment.  (O... used to have on the wall of his room an old sea map with the motto "You have to sail --- you don't have to live".)

There is a stupid, sentimental taboo against such reflections these days.  You are not supposed to "blame the victim", tho that is precisely what you have to do if you mean to understand oppression.  People are sometimes exploited thru their virtues, but it is generally more profitable as well as more dignified to utilize their vices.  Look around you.

However, one must not stop there.  I can believe that (probably for reasons related to capital --- I have no head for economics and can never work out the details) it was impossible for one boat to make its own tradeoff between safety & income; it would have had to be done for the industry as a whole, & would have meant raising the price of fish & lowering the catch.  Ways of doing that come crowding in to the decadent 20th-century capitalist mind: a cartel, a strong industry union, occupational-safety laws, or (perhaps simplest) compulsory insurance.  I dare say they have all been tried; at any rate, fishermen too have rock&roll while they catch the last of the fish, and the prices are such as to purge most customers of any residual shame.

What a pity!, Kipling would say: another machine for forcing people to grow up has been dismantled.  He has a point, but he only pricks us with it; he does not see the issue whole, & therefore has only written a somewhat preachy adventure story rather than a tragedy.  Has anybody in fact written the tragedy?  There is a great deal in print about Wealth, but generally, it seems, propaganda about this or that benefit or cost.  Wealth makes possible a civilized & generous style of life for large numbers of people who could not make it as saints.  The pursuit of it induces people to take risks & to keep accounts, and thereby to practise two cardinal virtues: courage & a sense of scale.  (One of Screwtape's silliest lies is his statement that we cannot be tempted to virtue.)  Wealth also makes people soft, smug, & picky; the pursuit of it makes them narrow & ferocious.  The growths & decays of these good & bad effects in a given person are all interdependent & messy.  Noticing them all would no doubt be instructive, but most moralists find it more edifying to ignore two or three quarters of them.  Either the pursuit ennobles but the success corrupts (romantics like Kipling), or the other way around (socialists), or the whole thing is good (capitalists), or the whole thing is bad (Christians --- I mean ones that believe Christ).

Of course, the point itself has been disputed, most emphatically by Skinner..., who believes that good engineering can render adversity useless.  The Marxists, I think, also believe something of the sort.  And no doubt, indeed, a good deal can be done to grade & minimize the risks.  But I am inclined to agree with [Bertrand] Russell that sanity (or at least --- shall we say --- dignity) is impossible without a lively & intimate appreciation of the fact that most of the world was not made for us & is out of our control.  _Too_ lively, tho, and you're dead; yet the lesson can scarcely be learned under control!  That is another tragedy.  [Whoever] has grown up, and [whoever] has not, both need their consolations --- alcohol & cynicism, as Mencken says.

But whether one has or hasn't is one thing, and whether one is hung up on the fact is another.  I belong to that queer minority...to whom this question is continually active in determining self-esteem.  Indeed, it seems likely that I'll start worrying about getting old before I stop worrying about being grown up --- rot before I ripen, like those dreadful persimmons & avocados from the supermarkets.  Somehow (perhaps Adler has a theory) the question was made very important for me, and yet society, unlike Kipling, provides no straightforward way of answering it --- no rite of passage.  (A very characteristic fantasy I thought up about 20 years ago is: everyone, at the age of 16, has to take an exhaustive 2-week exam in Competence for Happiness.  Those who fail are shot.  That, I thought, would give the human race the requisite for high morale it lacks most: exclusiveness.)

Until this year,...I mainly defended myself against this anxiety by proclaiming that the very notion of maturity was morally valueless & useful only for bullying.  This year, however,...I...found that it had its charms.  In particular, it seemed to me that altho [certain people] had been on the whole nicer & more lovable than I, I had an obvious point of superiority to them & it deserved a name.  How can we make sense of this?

I think there are two fundamental beliefs that every mammal starts with & that one may reasonably expect an intelligent one to get over as [he or she] grows older: (1) one or two people are going to take care of me, & (2) they are infallible.  Both disillusionments are hard, & whether we avoid them or accomplish them we generally require a good deal of self-deception for comfort.  Thus (1) most of us manage to spread our dependence over a patchwork containing selected individuals for limited uses, plus various artificial & natural abstract institutions, plus ourselves.  But we usually try to persuade ourselves that nothing has really changed, by deifying (i.e. mommy-daddyfying) this or that piece of the construction, or endowing the whole thing with a spurious personality.  Hence the popularity of gods & gangsters & various mixtures.  And (2) most of us realize that the fabric doesn't cover everything & even our parents didn't really.  But we realize it as seldom & as dimly as we can.

So what I say to Kipling is: self-reliance is only one aspect of the task of diffusing & acknowledging one's dependence; it can even be overdone.  And what I say to me is: in view of the frightfulness of the process, honesty is a necessity but also an impediment, and I have in the main used it as an impediment.  Nor am I about to stop.

I have been rereading a book, preparatory to citing it in a future LJ posting, that makes use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT --- the test in which a person is shown pictures and asked to make up stories about them).  I took the test several times when a child, and remember one or two of the pictures and my responses.  I had forgotten, tho, something the book mentions: that one of the "pictures" is completely blank.  I suppose the idea was that you were to make up a story without any prompting; at any rate, I suppose that was what I did at the time.  On imagining it now, tho, I immediately came up with two literal-minded responses:

1.  Since nothing is depicted, an empty universe (the vacuum) is intended.  It is currently speculated, however, that the vacuum is unstable, and is bound to decay into an exceedingly dense world that explodes & then condenses into stars & planets, some of them inhabited by organisms that give & take tests.

2.  This patch of white represents the field of view of a man staring at a featureless whitewashed wall.  He has been told to face it, but has not been told to close his eyes.  In a few seconds, he will be shot in the back of the neck.  His body will be removed, and the wall will be scrubbed & whitewashed again.

I have been rereading a book, preparatory to citing it in a future LJ posting, that makes extensive use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT --- the psychological test in which subjects are shown standard pictures & are asked to make up stories about them).  I took that test a number of times in my childhood, and even remember one or two of the pictures & my responses.  However, I had forgotten something that the book mentions --- that one of the "pictures" is a mere blank sheet.  The idea is that you are to make of a story without any prompting, and I dare say that in my youth that is what I did.  On imagining it again, however, I immediately came up with two literal-minded responses:

1.  Since nothing is depicted, an empty universe --- the vacuum --- is intended.  However, cosmologists have recently speculated that the vacuum is unstable.  It is bound to decay into an excessively dense universe, which will subsequently expand & condense into galaxies containing people making & taking tests.

2.  This white patch represents the field of view of a man who is staring at a featureless whitewashed wall.  He has been told to face it, but has not been told to close his eyes.  In a few seconds he will be shot in the back of the neck.  His body will be removed, and the wall will be scrubbed and whitewashed again.

Movie:   A Single Man (2009).

When I heard about this movie, I reread the book (http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/tag/a%20single%20man) & prepared to be disappointed.  The other day I got around to buying the DVD.  It includes a version with a subtitles & a voiceover, which is doubly useful to the likes of me in eking out my poor hearing and explaining what the makers of the film thought they were doing.

They put in a surprising amount of what was in the book, but as I expected, they had to leave a lot out.  They did get one bit of fantasy in:

The movie has to move that remark from fantasy to "reality" & turn it into a retort to his lady friend Charley, who has thereby been turned into something of a bitch.  Indeed, the makers of the movie did not like the homely character in the book:

In the movie, her hair is --- words fail me.

It strikes me now that they might have accommodated some more of the fantasies by acting them out, Walter Mitty fashion, with perhaps a musical motif to signal their unreality.  But even so, they would have had to leave out a lot of what was going on in his mind.  One picture is worth a thousand words, and takes as much disk space as a million.

Likewise, they did not like the professor's home & neighborhood, which Isherwood describes in fond detail: a bungalow in a gently decaying, slighly raffish development from the 1920s.  They have put him instead in a small but luxurious modern house.  The voiceover explains that he could afford it because he had an independent income, and claims to know better than the author what George needs; but that seems to me a mere excuse.  There is evidently a convention in the industry that no principal character can live in a house that costs less than a million dollars.

In the movie, the telephone conversation in which George is told of Jim's death is a big deal: he isn't invited to the funeral because he is not family, and that shows how powerful homophobia was in those days.  But in the book, it is a good deal subtler: he is invited, and gives "a curt No, thank you", thereby perhaps quelling speculations about the two of them, and in any case avoiding an embarrassing chore.

There is an implausible conversation in which Kenny, the undergraduate (he is said to be 21, but that is probably to avoid legal difficulties; he looks like a freshman), tries to persuade the professor to try out mescaline --- in 1962!  I suppose the idea is, this is The Sixties, so we have to put something druggy in.

I was warned by a review that in the movie George intends & prepares to kill himself that day.  His joy with Kenny dissuades him, but then he has the stroke all the same, not in his sleep (as in the book), but on the way to bed.  That makes it a different story --- I suppose no better & no worse --- in that his awareness that he is living his last day colors everything.  I myself liked Isherwood's version better --- just an ordinary day, happening to be the last.

In the movie, Kenny is in the living room, asleep.  There is no hint of how he will handle waking up in a dead man's house.  What a horrid loose end!

The (dis)credits at the end go on & on.  What labor & expense went into this thing!  Read the book.

These days I have been listening (FSVO listening) to The Barber of Seville while I wash up from meals.  I have never been into opera, but I am sentimental about some operas because the tunes are familiar from my childhood.  But listen?  It's in Italian.  If it were in English, I'd still have trouble understanding it, because I have trouble filtering voices (especially female ones) out of orchestral accompaniment.  (Besides my auditory shortcomings, it has always seemed out of proportion to me to accompany a single voice with a whole orchestra.  I wish I had a filter for Marlene Dietrich & Stan Rogers.)  And even if I could understand it, a glance at the booklet that came with the CD assures me that (a) I would not be able to follow the story, because it is complicated and has >3 characters, and (b) it I could follow it, I wouldn't bother, because it is silly.

It seems to me that we could make better use of the effort that went into composing & performing such a thing.  Why not take an interesting & useful passage of literature (say, the chapter on the systematics of nuclear stability in Leighton's Principles of Modern Physics), and set summaries of successive passages to the tunes?  One could forgo rhyme, and the rhythm would not be an excessive constraint.  If the result were funny, all the better.